Who gave them guns?!

I don't like it when unstable people are issued with firearms licenses and then permitted to wander among us armed to the teeth. I don't mean policemen; I have learned to live with the fear that a boy in blue will one day run amok at my place of work and turn his firearm against us because by the time he gets to the eighth floor, he will have run out of rounds; or hopefully he'll stop on the fourth floor and sort out our "administrative" problems once and for all. 

But I digress; I do not mean policemen should not carry firearms (even though they really shouldn't) but that elected representatives and "businessmen" with chips on their shoulders should not be issued with firearms licenses. They definitely should not be allowed to own firearms or bear them in public, if at all. Their mental instability has been chronicled in the pages of the nation's dailies for the past decade in which we have lived in fear of what they might do when the chips were down. This past week one of them discharged his licensed firearm at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport as he was handing it over to Kenya Airways staff prior to boarding a plane to Mombasa. The police tell us that no one was injured because at the time of the near-disaster, the firearm was "pointed in a safe direction."

Several things come to mind and not just the obvious ones like the exploding number of people with firearms who seem to be brandishing them or discharging them at airports. We haven't forgotten the arrogant Artur Brothers and their crass recklessness when they made the JKIA police authorities look like chumps in 2006. No, not that. The most interesting thing is that the Kenya Airports Authority, the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority, the National Police Service and Kenya Airways have a system for handling "VIPs" and their firearms when they pass through Kenya's airports: declare your firearm to the airline staff; hand it over to them in a "secure room"; board plane; travel; retrieve firearm; go on your merry way. I will worry now every time I board a plane in Kenya about how many firearms are on board, who has control of them and whether the ones who have control over the guns are as unstable as our elected representatives.

Something more insidious is apparent, though. That politician's firearm went off and the police are investigating whether the firearm is defective. They confiscated the firearm and allowed the MP to travel onwards to Mombasa. What should be of great concern to the thousands that pass through our domestic airports is that there are apparently untrained men and women carrying firearms in the airports who do not know how to properly handle those firearms.

We all remember the courage of Abdul Haji during the Westgate siege. We all recall his interviews after; during the siege he was calm enough to intervene in a dangerous situation without injuring any of his colleagues, unlike the members of the Kenya Defence Forces, or losing count of how many of his fourteen rounds he had fired. The MP-at-the-airport and his discharging firearm, on the other hand, raises doubts, serious ones too, that he even knows how many rounds his firearm holds, how to unload it, how to clean it or how to maintain it in a serviceable condition so that it does not accidentally go off in "sensitive" facilities such as airports.